FEATURED COMPANIES

Into 2013 there were over 130 million mobile subscribers in Japan with around 97% of these using 3G services. The overall Japanese mobile market remains in a dynamic period of activity. NTT DoCoMo still has a dominant market share, benefitting from its monopoly status years before. However, in close pursuit are KDDI, Softbank and smaller operator eMobile. While fighting for a bigger share in a saturated market, the operators continue to put more weight behind their data services to make up for declining revenue from phone calls. Softbank initially took advantage of its position as the sole carrier for the iPhone and the iPad in Japan. NTT has seen strong subscriber uptake since launching LTE services in December 2010 and is progressively shifting its subscriber base away from 3G services while introducing new data plans.This report provides an overview of Japanese mobile technologies and mobile data and content services. Providing extensive market, technology and operator based statistics, forecasting on mobile subscribers is also provided up to 2018.

Key Developments:

MIC review of mobile bandwidth allocations in the 2000MHz band by 2020 - to cater for anticipated explosion in demand for mobile and wireless data traffic;WiFi investments to provide for mobile offload strategies;launch by Softbank of its ‘Ultra Speed’ HSPA+ service;launch of NTT DoCoMo’s LTE network, branded ‘Xi’ with aim to cover 70% of population by March 2015;eMobile launch of LTE and subsequent acquisition of eMobile by Softbank;establishment of the Softbank affiliate Wireless City Planning to take over next-generation PHS service operations from Willcom;Softbank loses iPhone exclusivity;Amazon enters Japanese market as an MVNO;smartphone sales exceed feature phone sales for the first time;spectrum allocations in 900MHz and 700Mhz frequency bands;Softbank joined with Huawei to complete the deployment of what they claim was ‘the world’s first trial LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) network in the 3.5GHz spectrum band’.both NTT DoCoMo and Softbank move to introduce Voice over LTE (VoLTE) systems into their respective networks;further spectrum in the 3.4GHz-3.6GHz band set to be allocated for commercial 4G networks by 2015.